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When on the evening that the bank freeze ended the SCAN roundup mentioned some threatening clouds on the horizon in the form of armed forays into Texas across the Mexican border, they had no idea what a storm was brewing---a storm that was to transform the United States into an unlikely front line of the Africa-West conflict, and in the process disintegrate a nation that had for a century been trying to integrate blacks and whites peacefully.
But why America? What had America done to deserve it?
Before World War II, the United States dealt directly only with the former American colony of Liberia, the independent nation of Ethiopia, and the semi-independent nation of Egypt. In the 1950s, Ethiopia became a minor player in the Cold War after signing a series of treaties with the United States and receiving $282 million in military assistance and $366 million in economic assistance in agriculture, education, public, health, and transportation. This aid came through Washington's "Point Four" program and served as a model for American assistance to the newly independent African nations. The original goal of "Point Four" was to contain the spread of communism, which was not a major threat in Africa in the 1950s. More broadly it served as a political project to convince Africans that it was in their long-term interest to side with the West. The program sought to improve social and economic conditions without interfering with existing political or social order.
But it was not until 1956 that the real alarm over Africa was sounded when Egypt and the Soviet Union established very close ties. The OMEGA Memorandum was readied as a stick to reduce the regional power of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. When Egypt recognized Communist China, the U.S. ended talks about funding the Aswan Dam, a high-prestige project much desired by Egypt, a dam which was later built by the Soviet Union. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the Suez Crisis erupted with Britain and France invading to retake control of the canal. Using heavy diplomatic and economic pressure, the Eisenhower administration forced Britain and France to withdraw soon. A major result was that the U.S. largely replaced Great Britain in terms of regional influence in the Middle East.
From 1951 to 1960, all the colonial powers engaged in decolonization, starting with Libya (1951), Sudan (1954), Morocco and Tunisia (1956), and Ghana (1957). In 1958 President Eisenhower's State Department created the Bureau of African Affairs under the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs to deal with sub-Saharan Africa. Countries in North Africa were under the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. G. Mennen Williams, a former Democratic governor of Michigan, was the assistant secretary of state under President John F. Kennedy and he actively promoted and encouraged decolonization. The Kennedy administration also launched the Peace Corps, which sent thousands of young American volunteers to serve in local villages. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) started providing cash economic assistance, and the Pentagon provided funds and munitions for the local armies. But that euphoria ended when the Congo Crisis of the 1960s indicated very large-scale instability.
Whereas Eisenhower had largely neglected Africa, President John F. Kennedy took an aggressive activist approach. Kennedy was alarmed by the implications of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's 1961 speech that proclaimed the USSR's intention to intervene in anticolonial struggles around the world. Since most nations in Europe, Latin America, and Asia had already chosen sides, Kennedy and Khrushchev both looked to Africa as the next Cold War battleground. Under the leadership of Sékou Touré, the former French colony of Guinea in West Africa proclaimed its independence in 1958 and immediately sought foreign aid. Eisenhower was hostile to Touré, so the African nation quickly turned to the Soviet Union--making it the Kremlin's first success story in Africa. However, Kennedy and his Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver tried even harder than Khrushchev. By 1963 Guinea had shifted away from Moscow into a closer friendship with Washington. Kennedy had a broad vision that encompassed all of Africa; he opened up the White House to receive eleven African heads of state in 1961, ten in 1962, and another seven in 1963.
But perhaps the real African perils began under Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter (1977-1981). Historians generally agreed that Carter was not very successful where Africa was concerned. However, there were multiple explanations available. The orthodox interpretation posits Carter as a dreamy star-eyed idealist. Revisionists argued that it didn't matter nearly as much as the intense rivalry between dovish Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and hawkish National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Vance lost nearly all the battles and finally resigned in disgust. Meanwhile, there are now post-revisionist historians who blame his failures on his confused management style and his refusal to make tough decisions.
Since the Carter era, more and more black African countries oriented their economies more and more toward the United States. They encouraged rich Americans to hunt big game in the Serengeti, and treated middle-class Americans to spectacular views of grazing elephants, while at the same time importing casual labor to the U.S. in about equal numbers. They were joined in this by the North Africans so that by the 1980s the majority of the legal immigrants into the US were from the Afro-Arab world, and in addition, there were already some 8 million illegal African immigrants. Many were working for sums of money far below the US minimum wage, but far above any earnings they could hope to gain in the African fatherland. The savings they sent back home were an important contribution to the balance of payments of the poorer African countries, which tied them into the American economic nexus even more thoroughly. Then by a stroke of the pen, the day after the Anglo-Saxon resolutions had passed through the Bank/Fund meeting the right to remit any money from the United States to Africa was suddenly cut off.
News of this reached the government of the continent immediately in official communications from the United States which also notified them that most contracts for foodstuffs and manufactured goods were suspended "until a satisfactory settlement of outstanding debt is negotiated."
The cancellation of the US contracts of course meant closure for many struggling industries exporting to the West. Millions were rendered unemployed. For most there was no social security, no alternative lower-grade employment, not even a patch of land to cultivate back in the home village; the more adventurous, however, broke into the "Timbuktu" of the United States by crossing the Rio Grande, by slipping through the breaks in the barriers along the 2,000-mile land boundary, or by sailing thousands of miles across the Atlantic in primitive boats to the thousands of miles of open coast along the Gulf shores of the United States and up the southern reaches of the east and west coasts.
The United States had become, without recognizing it and so without acknowledging any responsibility for it, an extension of Africa, just as it had once been an extension of Western and then of Eastern Europe. It was the promised land for the poorest and most deprived in Africa, and its economy was the powerhouse for that continent. When it faltered the whole region was plunged into economic gloom. Now in June 1985 the powerhouse was not just faltering, it was shedding its load. All the economic assistance given under USAID was ended and trade was frozen.
As a final act of retribution for the economic aggression spearheaded by the Central African Republic, President Reagan ordered a ban on all immigration from Africa and simultaneously promised a stepping-up of the effort to prevent illegal immigration and to seek out and eject existing illegal immigrants. The most spectacular feature of these preventive measures was the proposal to revive an old plan drawn up in the 1960s for use in Vietnam---an electrified fence to prevent the incursion of VC/NVA forces from the north. This time the fence was to run along the whole length of the Mexican land border to stem the infiltration from south to north. The immediate result of these heavy-handed tactics was to produce an unprecedented surge in the existing Africa-to-North-America tide of immigration into the US. The would-be immigrants knew nothing about the state of feeling in the US but they could quite clearly sense that there was no future in their homelands and that the opportunities of escape would be lessened every day they waited. So by the thousands, the rural and the urban unemployed set off from all the countries of Africa by land, sea, and air to claim their share in the one place where both land and jobs could still be found.
Bogged down in economic depression, the US might not have seemed a land of promise to everybody, but it did to the people of Africa. What they left behind was an ecological disaster area. The rapidly growing population (confined to 40% of the worst land while the most fertile 60% was owned by the richest 2% of the population), had reduced the continent's hillsides and promontories to rocky wastes with not enough topsoil left to produce even a bad harvest. Many of the peasants had tried to seize the good land of the rich but they had been defeated by a national army supplied with arms by European powers, whereas all they could get was 3rd-hand arms said to come from Libya. In the cities, where landless peasants finished up if they did not emigrate, the scene was no better. There were even fewer jobs than a decade before because of all the available money had been siphoned off to pay debts to the West rather than invested to create jobs. Now the cutoff of all US funds made the job situation quite hopeless.
In every respect, the United States appeared as the great ogre, and yet it was to the United States that all of these economic and ecological refugees wished to go. This was partly because it was so incomparably rich that even its poor owned more than the richest tribal king. There was also a growing feeling in Africa that the southwest United States should be regarded as a kind of African homeland, in complete disregard of the historical fact that much of the territory had once been under first Spanish, then Mexican control and was so titled as Mexican as late as the 1940s. The Africans themselves disagreed, citing the book, Nomads of Niger, by American photographer Carol Beckwith and Belgian Anthropologist Marion Van Offelen. This book presented the history of the Fulani people of Africa by taking the reader back to approximately 5000 years old rock cave paintings in the Algerian Sahara, paintings that depicted people herding cattle in a way similar to the way the Fulani nomads herd their cattle today, a link that would span from African antiquity through the Spanish-African slave trade era to the days of the American West. Conclusion: the origins of the American cowboy lay in Africa and were imported to the New World by the Spaniards. Whatever the case, for the poor immigrants from Egypt, Mali, Somalia, or Ethiopia it was a simple matter: they regarded the southwest as a homeland because about 10 million Africans had made their home there, and Africans, being very tribal-oriented groups, welcomed the most distant relatives and even fellow tribesmen into their clans. So there emerged in the southwest corner of the United States a black community the size of Cuba with a growing sense of identity, which inevitably acted as a magnet to the restless, landless, hopeless masses of Africa.
There are no accurate records of the number of Africans passing across the US/Mexican border that summer, but according to reliable estimates, it was about 50,000 a week, including the boat people. About half of these were apprehended and returned across the border to try again. This flood swamped all the ordinary arrangements either for facilitating entry (by the immigration service and the border patrol). Declaring that "we cannot lose control of our borders" President Reagan sent in regular troops, officially to organize the building of the electric fence, to back up the border patrols. But these troops were largely black, and the local whites, fearing that they might not be tough enough, formed a further backup of vigilantes who were less scrupulous about black civil rights.
All of this confusion of responsibility did nothing to stop the waves of refugees beating up against the border and it did very little to prevent them from getting through and disappearing into the black communes. The concentration of public attention and armed protection along the 2,000-mile land border left the much longer stretches of seacoast even less well-patrolled than usual. Though there were no worthwhile records, there is some evidence that more West Africans (mainly from countries like Nigeria, Mauritania, Chad, and Cameroon) entered the United States by sea than by land. These seafarers did not usually settle where they landed but made straight for the black communities in the cities, financing their early days with the usual "refugee traveler's checks," which were small packets of hard drugs that they had brought with them to sell on the streets.
The Reagan Administration sought to conceal the loss of control of its borders from an angry white majority by giving the forthcoming, but still nonexistent, electric fence maximum publicity. Diagrams and models were shown on television illustrating that the fence would run through the places of greatest infiltration---the big border towns from Brownsville to El Paso to San Diego. As a demonstration of serious intent, a section of the fence was built within a week in the small and sleepy border town of Nogales. On the US side a second, barbed wire, fence was built 10 feet further in from the border to prevent accidental contact with the live electric fence. On the Mexican side, there was only the old wooden border fence (called the Burrito Curtain) which was so decrepit that it stopped no one. As a result the farm-animal population which habitually roamed the streets of the Mexican town rapidly diminished. Horrifying TV pictures of electrocuted pigs, ducks, and even ponies graphically illustrating what it meant to have a live wire running through one's community, were broadcast by the CNN satellite in Mexico to Africa and were also received loud and clear throughout the US Southwest.
The lesson for the African peasant watching his village television was that if he hoped to emigrate he had better do so at once before the fence was completed. The lesson for white Americans was complicated when the fence claimed its first known human victims---three Americans whose car went out of control in the street that runs alongside the border, crashed through the barriers, hit the fence, and with a blue flash burst into flames killing all three occupants. It was some weeks before the fence could be restored to working order.
The vigilante groups saw themselves faced with an external enemy of hundreds of millions and an internal fifth column of some 50 million, so they spread their defenses across the nation. At first, they were not united nationwide, and took various historic names: in the south and west, for example, they used the old paraphernalia of the Ku Klux Klan; in the Midwest, with a bow to the ghost of Colonel McCormick, they formed the American National Party; while in New England they chose the appropriate name of The Puritans. But whatever they called themselves, their policies were all the same: to preserve the traditional, European-based, American society and the private enterprise economic system that went with it against any large admixture of the poor and disease-ridden from Africa.
What was regrettably clear to the outside world and many American liberals was that the US, which had for 30 years been struggling to improve relations between the immigrant races of Europe, Asia, and Latin America had given up the struggle when faced with the trans-oceanic immigrants from Africa.
The Right and White alliance's nightmare of 50 million anti-American residents in the United States was unjustified but self-fulfilling. There were indeed about 50 million Hispanics, blacks, and others of Third World origin within the US and they did form an underclass in that supposedly classless society, but they did not feel themselves united with each other, and certainly not against the United States Government--at least, not until they perceived a common threat coming from that quarter. The Old American Negroes (to use the technical term that describes blacks whose family background in the United States dates back a century) wished to have as little as possible to do with the newcomers, even though they were fellow Negroes, as long as they felt that they, the OANs, had a reserved position, albeit on the lower rungs of American society. But that happy status had been deteriorating for some time, undermined by blacks of alien religions and languages from all corners of Africa with much more radical philosophies and no assured status in America. The United States authorities had begun to crack down on all black communities as refuges for illegal African immigrants. Finally, they decided to seek out and eject any who could not provide proof of citizenship. It was this process that triggered the Labor Day riots of 1985. Now, under severe pressure to do something about the sudden flood of Africans, the Reagan Administration stepped up the campaign from coast to coast. In a short time, Brothers of the Spear and other more militant organizations had thousands of recruits who felt that their communities had been unjustly violated by the US authorities. They were joined by their adult children, who felt that the US had never given them a proper home or job and deserved little of their loyalty.
The Federal fair employment rules meant that a proportion of blacks were to be found in the middle reaches of almost any profession from the army to the CIA to banking and academia. Such people would not rally to a "U.S.A for Africa" banner, but they could not be indifferent to a campaign banner against racial discrimination.
This was the appeal of the Anti-Racial Movement (ARM) which had been founded by Chicago students in the 1960s and attracted members of all races and nationalities (mostly African). In the 1970s a black teacher at Roosevelt College called Sebastian Foxworth radicalized it, substituting "militants" for Movement in its title and broadening its appeal first to Liberia (where he was born) and then to most of West Africa.
ARM achieved national prominence during the 1985 Labor Day riots when it was seen to be orchestrating the massive protests from the black establishments, including the powerful influence of the churches. At the same time, it was organizing the ghettoes in the cities to make more violent protests. All of this was directed against discrimination, even when it concerned admittedly illegal African immigrants, for whom ARM became the great protector. One month later, when immigration from Africa surged, it soon became apparent that ARM was the most powerful and the most militant force organizing Africans in the U.S. and their home continent.
The logo of ARM (a flexed arm with a mailed fist) began to appear on CNN television broadcasts, which now grew harsher and more pointed as the conflict across the seas, the borders, and the American cities grew fiercer. CNN used to the maximum its capacity to give the other side of the picture, and the picture of the other side. So compelling were some of the shots of the situation at the US/Mexico border, and conditions beyond the barriers in Los Angeles, Dallas, Cleveland, or New York, that they were eagerly pirated by local American stations. SCAN, headquartered in Los Angeles, monitored everything on CNN and also showed a certain proportion of this material on its network, which covered all of North America and much of the industrialized world.
Though its impact in the West was very considerable, there was no great protest as long as the CNN propaganda content was quite mild. But before long a true note of anger accompanied the shots of undocumented African-born US residents of ten years' standing behind shoved out of the United States and flown back to their countries of origin. What hurt American sensibilities most were some shots of refugees in frail leaky boats being turned back from Galveston in Texas into an almost certain watery grave; this was too vividly reminiscent of scenes from the film version of Leon Uris's Exodus when the British were the villains reviled for turning back Jewish refugees seeking to enter Palestine.
As a result, the increasingly anti-American narration cut all that much more deeply into the viewing public's self-esteem. There was true hatred in the deep African voices behind the pictures of handcuffed deportees, and it was matched on the part of American viewers by a growing hatred of the black enemy from Africa---for people always come to hate those they are accused of persecuting.
The CNN commentaries were no longer cool rational statesmen like Kolingba. They had been replaced by a new and terrifying character, a tall, strikingly handsome black in his forties.....Sebastian Foxworth.
He spoke fluent English, yet sometimes it was hard for people to understand what he was saying due to his thick, drawly West African accent. Sebastian was indeed a man of mystery; to this day no one knows who his parents were. The name Foxworth was taken from the port town in Liberia where he was said to have been born. But gradually the press and the intelligence agencies began to build up a picture of the man's past: in 1957, when he was a teenager, Sebastian had jumped ship in newly independent Ghana, where he fell under the spell of Nkrumah and was educated in black nationalism at his revolutionary training camp outside of Accra. After Nkrumah's fall in 1966, Sebastian returned to Liberia and tried to put the theories he had learned into practice as a member of that nation's extensive underground. From Nkrumah's pan-Africanism, he derived the idea of an alliance of all oppressed blacks, specifically including the blacks in the United States where he had spent much of his time at Roosevelt College in Chicago. He established cells of ARM all over the US and eventually in the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Since he had maintained his West African links, he associated ARM with a similar African organization, Black Hand, and together they were to be the backbone for an intercontinental campaign against the Anglo-Saxons. In the Virgin Islands, ARM's militancy was directed primarily and overtly against American "economic imperialism" and in particular against big business and multinational companies.
The breakup of the Bretton Woods institutions, their takeover by the Western rich, and the expulsion of the African poor were all in line with Sebastian's warnings. He had ready plans for all his militants to seize and occupy all property in the Virgin Islands owned or operated by Americans.
In the weeks immediately following the Bank/Fund meeting Sebastian had traveled all over West Africa trying to ensure workers' control of the plantations, factories, and business offices. His efforts were welcomed by those "leftwing" governments which had already begun to dispossess their large landlords (but not by those like Angola which had completed the process); it was resisted by "moderate" governments, such as Mali and Niger, which took more gradualists approaches to the redistribution of wealth.
There was never much doubt about who would win. In a buoyant economy, Kalingba's moderation and bourgeois democracy might have survived and given leadership in Central Africa. But its economy, cut off from the West, was collapsing, and the labor force which had more than doubled in 25 years was young, revolutionary, and very largely unemployed. Inevitably the radical and militant appeal of ARM and Sebastian was stronger than counsels of moderation in a region where more than 1/2 of its population was under the age of sixteen.
Sebastian got his way: in country after country, the relics of the multinational economy were taken over not by the government on behalf of the local business community, but by the "workers" on behalf of ARM. Yet there was no attempt by the militants to take over the moderate or military governments themselves; they were left to wither on the vine, coping as best they could with a disintegrating society increasingly anarchic and dangerously divided between peasant and city dwellers.
This was the man who began to appear on American television screens in October 1985 (courtesy of CNN), and soon provided the most compulsive viewing in the history of American television. He broke all the rules: he was not comforting or humorous; he exposed the situation that most Americans had chosen to ignore and told them plainly that it could destroy them unless they acted swiftly and decisively. "You have much to fear, but above all that lack of fear which prohibits action."
He used TV to show how deep the hatred of America in many parts of Africa---something that had never been reported before, except possibly as an example of the wickedness and absurdity of communist propaganda. Sebastian made it clear that this hatred had little to do with distant international conspiracies or Soviet infiltration, and very much to do with the perception of the African people that they were exploited, robbed, and oppressed by the American people who lived so we at their expense.
Sebastian inspired fear and hate in a broad cross-section of the American public, but he was a hero to the underclass and especially to Africans, who felt that he was one of them. There were thousands of economic refugees scattered around the United States who felt a personal debt of gratitude to Sebastian for having given them sanctuary. For most of the illegal immigrants the hardest part of their journey had never been crossing the Atlantic, crossing the U.S./Mexico border, or landing on the shoreline, it was finding a place of permanent refuge at some distance from their entry point.
Sebastian had organized the most efficient underground network for transporting black people from south to north since the years before the Civil War when thousands of blacks were smuggled into the free states from the slave states in the South. As with ARM itself, he had built on an existing structure, in this case, the Sanctuary movement which had started in the early 1980s by rebellious younger clergy, mostly white, operating out of Southern California. Sebastian had widened its base to take care of those Africans most in need---the boat people who landed in territory where there were no existing communes to offer temporary shelter. At the same time, he had managed the incredibly difficult and delicate diplomatic task of getting the public endorsement of Sanctuary by a Roman Catholic archbishop (black), an Episcopal bishop (black), and the whole hierarchy of the Southern Baptist church including, most importantly, Jerry Rivers (registered at birth in New Orleans in 1931 as Gerald Rivières).
This charismatic black preacher had spent much of his life as a missionary in Africa where he had learned to preach in Swahili as well as his parental languages of French and English. On his return five years before, he had crisscrossed the United States preaching that the salvation of his oppressed people would come through unity with the even poorer and equally oppressed Christian peoples to the east in Africa. His popularity grew rapidly, more because he was a spellbinder that put his black, white, or even Hispanic audiences at the center of the universe than because of any understanding of his rather esoteric politico-economic reasoning. But whatever the cause, in the past six months he had become, as a kind of successor to the late Reverend Martin Luther King, the front runner for nomination as the black candidate for President, having also in his pocket the support of nearly 10 million potential Hispanic voters.
It was easier to persuade the religious authorities than the civic of the merits of supporting Sanctuary. The mayors of the big cities were vividly aware that such a public declaration by them would be condoning an illegal course of action, which could result in the Federal or State authorities intervening against them. They were also nervous about the amount of support, if any, they would get from their citizens if they permitted a sudden influx of non-citizens who might well become a charge on the public purse and would tend to compete for jobs, living space, schools and other amenities with the existing resident black race.
The best that ARM could get was the reluctant agreement of some mayors to look the other way when illegals came into their city, and not to collaborate with the Federal authorities in their offensive tactics of "seek out and eject."
There was one exception: Chicago's black mayor had decided, for a mixture of reasons, that it was in the interests of Chicago to stand up for the old values that made it great and to admit all those who had knocked at its door in trouble, poverty or political distress. He told Sebastian of his decision and suggested that it should be used to loosen up some of his mayoral colleagues. With considerable political skill they decided that the announcement should be made by the Mayor himself in the presence of Sebastian and the Reverend Jerry Rivers; to add to the solemnity of the occasion the Reverend Rivers should be asked to start the proceedings in some religious building. The final decision on location was inspired: it would be the lawn of the University of Chicago chapel, which was the heart of Chicago's black South Side but away from the oppressive and crowded high-rise buildings.
But all was not smooth sailing. The Republican governor warned the Democratic Mayor against allowing any seditious speeches that might result in a breach of the peace or advocate breaking the law. "Given the public record of Foxworth and Rivers, I shall keep one unit of the National Guard on duty in the vicinity to maintain law and order."
As the crowds (mostly black) filled the surroundings of the chapel and spilled down the Midway, two companies of uniformed National Guardsmen (mostly white) tried, without success, to be inconspicuous as they crowded into one of the wired-off tennis courts on the Midway's south side.
Some 1/4 of a million people went to salute their Mayor and cheer "their next President" but above all to see the mystery man Sebastian, so familiar from his TV appearances but never before seen in public since he'd left Chicago ten years earlier. The Mayor led the way out of the chapel between a double line of Chicago police, now more black than Irish, and up the rickety steps to a small dais with only three chairs and a lectern on it. The loudest applause was for Jerry Rivers because properly organized crowds know that potential Presidential candidates expect that and the press measures it carefully, but the crowd craned their necks and stood on tiptoe to try and see Sebastian as he took his seat to the left of the Mayor. At this moment there was a noisy demonstration from the roof of the University Library tower where a group---some in Klansmen's robes---shouted abuse and unfurled banners telling Foxworth to "go back to Africa." It didn't last long, and the TV viewers, who saw it best, heard a commentator dismiss the protestors as "probably the Chicago economics department."
The Mayor opened the proceedings with a tribute to the city of Chicago for the openhanded welcome it had given to strangers from all over the world over the years, with the unrevealing statement that today Chicago, like all American cities, faced the challenge of what to do about "our brothers in Africa who are seeking shelter in our midst." The Mayor had calculated that it would be better politics to be seen to be shoved by his people rather than to get out front on the issue of Sanctuary; but the television cameras caught a look of puzzled annoyance on Sebastian's face while he was being rather formally introduced as "no stranger to this great city, born in Africa and a champion of his people's rights."
Sebastian rose and went to the lectern to deliver the most fateful speech of his life to date, and also the most violent. Something had snapped inside of him; maybe it was the seeming failure of the Mayor to fulfill his pledge of support for Sanctuary, perhaps it was the sight of the National Guard across the Midway as a symbol of white power, or maybe it was the contrast between wealthy America, even black America, compared to the poor, hungry, homeless people of his Africa with whom he had been so continuously involved for the past few weeks. He spoke with passion of the hatred and envy with which white America was regarded in Africa, warning that this was the greatest threat to the American way of life and the peace of its cities. The desire of the landless, the jobless, and the hopeless to seek to share the crumbs of American affluence would draw hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, into the United States; no electric fences and no frontier guards could isolate America from Africa. If these so-called illegals were treated with contempt as enemy aliens who should be ejected, they would remain enemies, but enemies within the gates, whom all of America's nuclear arsenal could not dislodge, destroy, or deter from fighting for their right to live.
"Today Chicago must choose, as America must choose, whether to give sanctuary to the oppressed, even if it means fighting the oppressor, your Government, and many of your people, or to line up shamefully with those oppressors."
He paused for some moments to let the applause roll in, and then shouting over it, his eyes flashing from anger. Sebastian introduced Jerry Rivers as an enemy of oppression and a friend of the downtrodden. The black preacher strode up to the lectern drinking in the intoxicating applause, but when he began to speak into the microphone his voice was inaudible. He tapped the mike and there was still no sound above the applause. Then a crackling voice could just be heard coming from across the Midway. All heads turned away from the lectern towards an army truck near the National Guard with loudspeakers on its roof from which the voice seemed to be coming. After a series of false starts, it suddenly came through loud and clear. "This is your governor from Springfield speaking. I have listened to the speech just made by Sebastian Foxworth and I consider it seditious and liable to cause a breach of the peace. I have therefore had the public address system disconnected, and by the powers vested in me, I declare this meeting closed and order the crowd to disperse. In five minutes the National Guard will begin to clear the area." There was a great stamping of feet as the National Guard fell into marching order, and then the loudspeakers in the van were turned off with loud electronic bangs which almost drowned the short sharp crackle of rifle fire.
The crowd and the TV viewers saw the Reverend Jerry Rivers fall to his knees beside the microphone, while Sebastian slumped from his chair to the platform. There was a moment of total silence, then pandemonium broke out fully recorded on TV. The chief of police (a black) took control of the platform area. The Mayor, shocked but unharmed, was bundled into his car within seconds and driven off at high speed. Half a minute later an ambulance took Sebastian and Rivers to Billings Hospital, a few hundred yards away. 15 minutes later the hospital made its clinical low-key announcement: Rivers had been dead on arrival with a bullet in his brain; Foxworth had been knocked unconscious by a flesh wound in the neck which bled profusely but had not damaged any artery. He was now resting under sedation.
That was indeed what the doctor had prescribed for Sebastian, but in fact within minutes he was taken away from the hospital by ambulance and driven to the old Midway airport where, within one hour of the assassination attempt, he took off by private aircraft to an undisclosed location in West Africa.
On the Midway the crowd was convinced that the shots had come from the National Guard and so fled away from them into the university area, pausing only to wreak minor damage before hurrying back to their homes 3 miles north. A few scattered remnants of the crowd who lived in the immediate area didn't return at once to their homes but stood around, readily giving statements to the TV cameras about how they had seen the soldiers raise their rifles and fire.
The guardsmen, mostly fresh-faced farm kids from southern Illinois, were totally at a loss and halfheartedly tried to clear the few stragglers and the TV crews. Finally, they were withdrawn to the tennis courts, but not before the TV cameras had wordlessly convicted them of perpetrating the shooting. An hour later, as night fell, the troops, confused and miserable, were ordered to reboard their buses for the drive back to the barracks. As the four big buses drew into the middle road of the Midway there was a deafening roar and all but the lead bus were shattered by explosions. Fifty men were killed outright and seventy were injured (including one Negro). This scene, too, was caught by a lone TV camera which a local station had kept on duty at the scene of the rally. It was soon shown in all its horror around the world.
Chicago burned that night! It was like a beacon, and fires answered it across the nation. In every major city, as the Chicago news was spread by television, both sides sought revenge---the whites for their guardsmen's sons, the underclass for their dead and wounded leaders.
Before a semblance of order was restored, well over 1,000 deaths were reported and the loss of 2 billion dollars in property damage was reported. However, some of the more serious property damage was not immediately noticed. It first surfaced at the University of Chicago, where scientists reported that almost all their long-term experiments had been ruined by some prolonged interference with their electric controls. This was attributed to random vandalism by the mob as they fled from the scene of the assassination; but reports began to come in from across the nation of serious interference with computer facilities, even in places where there had been no physical violence or break-ins. Accounting systems were screwed up in a busy town like Omaha; for days the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) in San Francisco refused to operate reliably on its automated circuits. On irrigated farmland, automatic sprinkler systems ran amok, spoiling crops worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Every day new reports came in. Some were made public, but they had little impact because they were not totaled and broadcast nationwide, nor were they blamed solely on one thing.
They did, however, deeply trouble the National Security Council, which was now turning its full attention to these domestic disruptions. It was also disturbed by a paragraph in the report on the National Guard bus explosion which said that the explosive device found intact on the surviving bus was the latest version of the US anti-submarine radio-activated limpet mine. It had been stolen from the top security warehouse at the old Lake Shore naval station, just north of Chicago.
Slightly more welcome (and publishable) news was that the ballistic experts had proof that the bullets that felled Foxworth and Rivers could not have been fired by the National Guard but were fired from a "Marksman sharpshooter" rifle, probably from the direction of the library tower, certainly not from in front where the National Guard had been. However, no further leads were found in the library tower or anywhere else.
The public clearing of the National Guard came far too late to stem the tide of hate that was engulfing the nation. There were now clearly two sides, both convinced of the rightness of their cause, determined to seek out the weak spots in the enemy and destroy him. This was a war fought out before the TV cameras but not bound by any of the usual rules of war. The front line now ran through the cities of the United States.515Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKCGOtK9tDx
